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It's not that hard to improve your success rate if you say times your interceptor fail to make it out of the silo don't count http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn121704.cfm

And on the times that do count you know when and where incoming missiles are launched from and they include handy-dandy homing beacons for your interceptors.

And hey, why not realize that it's more realistic for any nuclear power to pay off some smugglers to import a nuke through our portsr?

Four pages is all it should take to briefly introduce a new theory, which is what George is doing.

p.s. George Chapline is very a bright fella with a history of suggesting contrarian theories. At least one of those theories has led to a entire branch of nuclear physics.

Actually, the notion that the Hindenburg was doomed by its skin appears to be crank theory that fooled a lot of people.

Let me point out to Bob Park's point of view on the way science is viewed by the current administration.

For those of you who don't know who Park is or have not read the excellent Voodoo Science, he is the president of the American Physical Society.

Murphy(c)

As others have said in this thread, this is an old problem. Interestingly, other professional societies have generally dealt with this reasonably well. Both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society assess page charges from the authors to help cover costs, as well as modest subscription costs from libraries.

Even though there are free archives of preprints, where content is available publicly, people are still willing to pay a little for the stamp of peer-review. Certainly one could imagine an automated system that would distribute manuscripts to appropriate referees at comparatively little cost, but you have to remember that not all "peers" view refereeing as good citizenship. Many view it as a burden, not unlike jury duty.

Finally, let's keep our eyes on the big picture: it's typically for-profit publishing houses , not professional societies, that squeeze libraries for every penny, have outrageously inflated page charges, and generally lower quality and standards.

As everyone who reads What's New by Bob Park http://www.aps.org/WN/ knows, the shuttle has no scientific value. Humans in space are a huge waste of money. Robots are far superior.

Also (La)TeX has become de rigeur for publishing in scientific journals. Compare the submission guidelines for sending an article to any The Physical Review journals in any of the TeX variants they prefer to that of doing a submission with MS Word. The American Mathematical Society apparently won't even accept papers typeset in anything other than LaTeX.

For scientific publishing, LaTeX really is the way to go.

It's news because the replicated findings are finally getting printed in a peer-reviewed journal, Physical Review E. The press release means that the authors say they did it, it means little until it get accepted by a journal. Do I think this is the wave of free energy? No but as far as a pure science aspect, it is interesting. Several assupmtions still need to be worked out anyways with the calculated temperature. Assumptions always need tested... Phys. Rev. E 69, 036109 (2004) http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v69/e036109doi:10 .1103/PhysRevE.69.036109

Oh yes.

Talk about faster than light travel attached to some pop-sci articles. Atleast if you'd linked to a few respectable journals or archives, it would make sense.

I couldn't find anything about it on Phys Rev E yet.

Yeah, well Bob Park shat all over it when the experiment was first reported, as he's want to do for anything not involving big-budget tokamaks.

There's a difference between being professionally skeptical and being openly hostile towards unexpected developments in science. I'm afraid APS/Park fall on the side of being high-priests of high-energy. A scientist must be both completely open minded and rigorously skeptical - those two qualities are not exclusive and if you lack one you're not really in it for the science, you're in it for your agenda.

In this case he impuned the veracity of the ORNL group and was wrong about it.

In any event, it's not Mr. Fusion. The amount of actual fusion is tiny, and well below any commercially or societally interesting level.

You're right that the freedom Wikipedia enables is important. And I'm not surprised you think the key question is one of building tools on top of it. Tools can be transformative - wikipedia itself is mainly just a tool that brings ordinary people in to contribute to it.

The interesting thing to me, though, working for an academic publisher with very tightly controlled review processes, are two other things the wikipedia project has proven:

#1 - complete freedom, lack of control, trust in the general average person out there, can accomplish amazing things. There is much less reason to fear that sort of freedom than we might have thought, and I think wikipedia's success has cross-fed the Open Access movement in science publishing, which on balance is a very good thing.

#2 - But ... if you really need reliable information, it needs a stable, reliable review process - no such process will be perfect, but review does far more than we sometimes give it credit for. In particular, a reliably reviewed source rarely if ever has difficulties with "difficult people, trolls, and their enablers".

Yes this is a rejected story from slashdot.

Yes this is a rejected story from slashdot.

Yes this is a rejected story from slashdot.

I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.

But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.

One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.

Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.

There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.

Other than publications, the American Physical Society , for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.

Philip Coyle:

The ground-based midcourse defense system, as it is now called, has not shown that it can hit anything other than missiles whose trajectory and targets have been preprogrammed by missile defense contractors to eliminate the surprise or uncertainty of battle. Nor has it proven that it can hit a tumbling target, perform at night, or find ways to counter the decoys and countermeasures that a real enemy would use to throw a defense off track. Tests so far have all been conducted at unrealistically low speeds and altitudes, and it is not clear that the system will be able to track and identify the warhead it is supposed to destroy.

Defense Tech:

collection of top physicists concluded that it was essentially impossible to knock down a missile in its "boost phase," right after it launches.

Slate:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

But hey, it's not like they aren't doing their best, testing it thoroughly, acting to develop a real system capable of doing real work:

Thomas P. Christie, director of the Pentagon's office of Operational Test and Evaluation, said a shortage of testing data would likely make it difficult for him to assess the system's effectiveness ahead of any deployment

But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all those scientists working for the military contractors know something that the rest of the scientific world doesn't.

Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.

The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.

So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.

Physics Today has several articles dealing with the subject, and the actual report can be obtained here.

The verdict: living under the physical laws we all have to obey, boost phase missile defense really doesn't work -- even if the interceptors can get off the ground. Continuing on in with the fiendishly expensive and marginally beneficial program (beneficial in terms of the defense contractors' job security) in the light that it is not physically possible to expect a reasonable chance (or sometimes even a chance) of success is a demonstration of the Administration's ignorance of science and fact, as well as pork-barrel spending at its worst.

So, I'm not surprised at all about the failure -- and wouldn't be even if they launched the interceptor successfully. It's too bad that we won't see any sort of rational discussion of the topic of missile defense in Congress now that the topic is so politically charged.

Will someone please explain to the Bushtard that you can't change the laws of physics, even for matters of national security? I mean, seriously. This is getting out of hand.

If such a system had existed. It's a fairly well known fact in academia and science circles that this defense system is nowhere near the capability of actaully shooting a real missile down -- it can barely even shoot down fake ones.

Robert Park (of American Physics Society) has been covering this for a while, and there are many well-documented problems with the system, of which some he mentions in this newsletter.

More about the second author of that paper (scroll down to "Hetherington and Willard article)

In any case, the USSR is no longer a threat and star wars morphed into the current program of defending against individual crude ICBMs from the so-called rogue states. This program started looking at boost phase interception, which is interesting as it protects against some of the most simpler countermeasures. There is, for example, only going to be limited ICBM, and they will be hot. However, the boost time is very short, so the US would have to identify the launch event, confirm the identity of the projectile, set up the trajectory of our own ballistic device, and launch, within a matter of minutes. Our device would then have to be fast, accurate, and maneuverable in order to intercept.

The APS did a study on this and found that rockets would have to be faster and bigger than those normally proposed. Something like a thousand vehicles would be necessary, and the cost would be enormous. Even then, some coastal areas of the US would remain defenseless. In particular, even if the vehicle were disabled, inertia would still enable the live munition to make contact. All this is true only for the antique liquid propelled missiles we expect N Korea and Iran to be developing. The system would be less effective against solid rockets, and not against those launched from the middle east.

I believe these issues are why the airborne laser is so popular. The system would not require the expense of a thousand large vehicles, and would allow more time to detect an event and make a decision. However, according to the report, the system would only be effective against the crude liquid fuel missile.

Practically speaking, I think such a system would be too simple to defend against. The simplest thing would be to target the aircraft during an ICBM launch. A 747 is not exactly stealth, and evasive action is sure to throw off the effectiveness of the laser. It will not be necessary to disable the vehicle. A suicide mission involving several enemy aircraft would certainly do the trick.

<my guess>
Space has dimensionality; a plane has 2 dimensions, a cube exists in 3, hypercube 4... the numbers here are positive. Mandelbrot said he was using negative dimensions to measure "emptiness". He mentions that only one set is considered "empty" (I presume the null set). My guess (and I only minored in math so don't go betting on this) is that a negative dimension is to a positive dimension what a negative number is to a positive one. I'm thinking that if an object existed in -2 dimensions, it would be capable of having negative area. If you could add that object to an object with positive area, you'd reduce the second object's area.
</my guess>

Here's Mandelbrot's homepage at Yale.

Here's more links.

This is the American Physical Society's "What's New" newsletter from Bob Parks for October 29th, 2004

Check out Item 1.

Your blind faith in this unproven, hugely expensive, engineering disgrace that a majority of scientists and engineers oppose or criticise as a completely ineffective and unproven and that could not actually defend us from missiles is what makes America great.

Seriously, read Bob Park once in a while - it's his favorite subject. (example at http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn102204.cfm)

Your blind faith in this unproven, hugely expensive, engineering disgrace that a majority of scientists and engineers oppose or criticise as a completely ineffective and unproven and that could not actually defend us from missiles is what makes America great.

Seriously, read Bob Park once in a while - it's his favorite subject. (example at http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn102204.cfm)

They are outsourcing the Total Information Awareness Project to Global Information Group Ltd. in the Bahamas.

Be afraid... be very afraid.

For a much better source of articles, see What's New, by Bob Park from the American Physical Society, who writes about what's happening in science. Park is a physicist, and knows what he's talking about.

Bob Park of has a column, titled What's New, in the APS' newsletter. He's a great source of exposees on the missile defense farce, among other gov't foolishness. Click here for some of his columns. I'm sure there are others.

Did you know that even when there is a homing beacon in the target missile (a luxury our enemy will probably not afford us), our "defense" system still misses it the vast majority of the time? Money that could be spent to improve the system was instead allotted by the Bush regime to deploying a faulty system for political gain.

Bob Park of has a column, titled What's New, in the APS' newsletter. He's a great source of exposees on the missile defense farce, among other gov't foolishness. Click here for some of his columns. I'm sure there are others.

Did you know that even when there is a homing beacon in the target missile (a luxury our enemy will probably not afford us), our "defense" system still misses it the vast majority of the time? Money that could be spent to improve the system was instead allotted by the Bush regime to deploying a faulty system for political gain.

Politics:
http://dailykos.com/
http://atrios.blogspot.com/

For science (not quite a blog)
http://www.aps.org/WN/

It is most definitely not equally possible explanation for oddities in astronomical observation, at least as far as our knowledge of physics goes.

Many experiments have been done so far in attempts to verify/disprove that Newton's law is an exact law (there's Greenland Experiment and another one). None of them, so far, can say definitely that inverse square law was violated (deviations can mostly be attributed to variations in local mass density).

All that dark matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation (that's why we cannot optically detect it, and "see" it only by looking at its gravitational effect). There are many known weakly interacting particles that can be good candidates for dark matter.

PS. BTW, dark matter is anything but theoretical--it's a conjecture based on experimental evidence. There is no postulate or prior assumptions in physics that will predict existence of dark matter.

It is most definitely not equally possible explanation for oddities in astronomical observation, at least as far as our knowledge of physics goes.

Many experiments have been done so far in attempts to verify/disprove that Newton's law is an exact law (there's Greenland Experiment and another one). None of them, so far, can say definitely that inverse square law was violated (deviations can mostly be attributed to variations in local mass density).

All that dark matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation (that's why we cannot optically detect it, and "see" it only by looking at its gravitational effect). There are many known weakly interacting particles that can be good candidates for dark matter.

PS. BTW, dark matter is anything but theoretical--it's a conjecture based on experimental evidence. There is no postulate or prior assumptions in physics that will predict existence of dark matter.

Oh, shit! This again and again.

Cold fusion is impossible and Physics have long demostrated it.

Robert L. Park, the President of the American Physical Society, wrote a book that deals with this and explains it clearly: Voodoo Science. He will probably treat this "rebirth" of the hype on his What's new science column.

How long until the USA Government understands they cannot beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

Oh, shit! This again and again.

Cold fusion is impossible and Physics have long demostrated it.

Robert L. Park, the President of the American Physical Society, wrote a book that deals with this and explains it clearly: Voodoo Science. He will probably treat this "rebirth" of the hype on his What's new science column.

How long until the USA Government understands they cannot beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

...low-G manufacturing...

More budget-bloating propaganda from your friends at NASA.

No one has ever shown the viability, or the necessity, of low-G manufacturing.

Search the American Physical Society for the "What's New" newsletter archives. Bob Park and other renown scientists can give you plenty to chew on regarding the utility of low-G manufacturing.

We bounce lasers off of it as was recently discussed on /. to help prove general relativity

Testing Relativity with Laser Ranging to the Moon K. Nordtvedt, Jr.
Department of Physics, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana
Received 11 December 1967; revised 29 February 1968

Now CowboyNeal has been slow in getting some stories posted on the main page, but this is ridiculous!

I've been involved in these discussions for years, and happen to work for one of the major scientific publishers. Unfortunately this meme that scientific publishing model is somehow unique with dastardly publishers standing in the middle extracting payments from all has become far too entrenched, but it's really not a unique sort of situation at all.

Simple counterexample where exactly the same model applies: the Olympics. Just as billions of dollars are spent every year by publishers on the process of selecting the best scientific articles to publish, billions of dollars are spent by the host Olympic organization every four years establishing a venue for the world's best athletes to compete. A lot of that money goes into things that might seem unimportant to an outsider, like buildings and computers and IT and security staff etc. None of the money spent on the olympics goes to the athletes who bring their talents - other than the small amount that goes into paying for the medals themselves. Athletes in fact have to pay their own transportation expenses (or usually their home country takes care of it) - and then all those spectators pay again for the privilege of watching them compete. And you who watch on TV are paying via the advertising you have to endure, who have paid the TV network that has paid the Olympic organizers for the rights to broadcast.

Obviously, it would be much simpler and more efficient for athletes to just record their best performances in whatever stadium is available, and post it up on a website - then every four years somebody just picks the best performances and awards medals. Simple, right?

So why do we still spend all that money on the spectacle? Hmmm.

My old chemistry professor wrote an extremely funny article on the subject of quantum baseball. Okay, so extremely funny is a relative term, but at least I enjoyed it...

http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0100/010008.cfm

These clusters differ in age by 7 billion years. Is it really fair to assume the ratio of hot gas and other things is the same?

Do cosmologists take into account the mass equivalent of all the non-dark energy (light) that is flying around in space? How about the radiation pressure from it?

cassimir (sp?) effect on a galactic scale. Gravity from virtual particle pairs?

Lastly, how does one calculate (as I read Feyman did) the energy density of free space? Link please.

This project claims many big improvements. First, programmers will be available to help parallalize code of scientists, who may be experts at, say, weather or protein folding but may not be experts at parallel code. Further, the facility is supposed to be open to all scientists from all countries and funded by any agnecy. CPU cycles are to be distributed on a merit-only basis, and not kept witin DOE for DOE grantees to use, as apparently has happened within various agencies in the past.

The idea is to make it more like other national labs where - for example in neutron scattering - you don't have to be an expert on neutron scattering to use the facility. They have staff available to help and you may have a grant from NSF or NIH but you can use a facility run by DOE if that's the best one for the job.

I attended this session at the American Physical Society meeting this March and I'm assuming this is the project referred to in the talks - I apologize if I'm wrong there, but this is at least what is being discussed by people within DOE. I'm essentially just summarizing what I heard at the meeting so although it sounds like the obvious list of things to do, apparently it has not been done before.

The prospect of opening such facilities to all scientists from all nations is refreshing during a time where so many problems have arisen from lack of mobility of scientists. For example, many DOE facilities such as neutron scattering at Los Alamos (LANL) have historically relied on a fraction of foreign scientists to come and use the facility and this helps pay to maintain it. Much of this income has been lost and is not being compensated from other sources. Further, many legal immegrants working within the Physics community have had very serious visa problems preventing them from leaving the country to attend foreign conferences. The APS was held in Canada this year and the rate of people who could not show up to attend and speak was perhaps ten times greater then the APS conferences I attended previously. Although moving it to Canada helped many foreign scientists attend, it prevented a great deal of foreign scientists living within the US from going. Even with a visa to live and work within the US, they were not allowed to return to the US without additional paperwork which many people had difficulty getting.

Obviously, security is heightened after 9/11, as it should be. I'm bringing up the detrimental sides to such policies not to argue no such policies should have been implemented, but to suggest the benefits be weighed against the costs - and the obvious costs such as to certain facilities should either be compensated directly or we should be honest and realize we are (indirectly) cutting funding to facilities which are (partly) used for defence in order to increase security.

I mention LANL despite it's dubious history of retaining secrets because I have heard talks by people working there (this is after 9/11) on ways to detect various WMD crossing US boarders. Even though they personally are (probably) well funded, if they facilities they need to use don't operate any more this is a huge net loss. My understanding is that all national labs (in the US) have had similar losses from lost foreign use.
____________________________________________ ___

• April 2004
• August 2003

• April 2004
• August 2003

• April 2004
• August 2003

Frankly, there's no surprise here. Besides the education problem, it's no secret that the advancancement in US science is due, for a good part, to people coming from abroad. But believe me, this kind of story makes you think twice before you emigrate... Well, at least, I do.

9. astro-ph/0208010 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Comparing WIMP Interaction Rate Detectors with Annual Modulation Detectors
Authors: Craig J. Copi, Lawrence M. Krauss
Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters
Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D67 (2003) 103507

... in his What's New column on April 2:

1. COLD FUSION: TRUE BELIEVERS SEE DOE REVIEW AS "VINDICATION."
There hasn't been much to celebrate in the 15 years since the University of Utah held a press conference in Salt Lake City to announce the discovery of "cold fusion." Although a brave little band of true believers continued to trumpet cold fusion, the band leader was publishing "Infinite Energy Magazine." That made it pretty hard to take this stuff seriously. Although there was no press release or announcement, DOE has apparently agreed to take a second look. That's not really too surprising; not since the Reagan administration has unbridled technological optimism so dominated Washington decision making: missile defense, hydrogen cars, hafnium bombs, manned missions to Mars. How are these other ventures doing? ...

A major weakness of the ABL is its vulnerability to attack by enemy aircraft or by SAMs. Escort fighters could defend the ABL against enemy aircraft; however, the very long times on station would make such defense difficult, unless absolute air superiority had been established or some warning mechanism could scramble fighters to respond to an attack on the ABL. Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 was accidentally shot down on 4 October 2001 by a S-200 SAM missile at a range of about 250 km. The maximum range of a S-200 is 250-300 km [1].

This poster is entirely correct, except for one part.

imagine flying over Japan and watching North Korea

In truth, very detailed studies have found that the laser weapon the ABL uses, though flying in the stratosphere (above most weather) would be ineffective even though the thin clouds that sometimes form at that elevation. Even on a clear day, the range of the laser is quite limited, necessitating that the airplane fly within surface-to-air (SAM) missile range of North Korea to even hope of hitting any missiles. Iran was the other test case for this system, unfortunately Iran is much larger than North Korea, and the plane would have to be flying over Iran itself to be within range of interior missile sites.

This project is pretty much a handout to the defense industry and vestige of the beam weapon dreams held over from the Star Wars heydey under Reagan.

I happen to have written a semester essay (PDF) precisely on this topic. I wrote the essay for an excillent course that deals with nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, missile defense, and arms control. The course website contains a host of up-to-date information and links, and is the longest running course of it's kind.

For a much broader and in depth view of boost phase missile defense, please see this APS study on the subject. I reccommend the brief, but informative executive summary. (PDF)